Page 6 of The Lodge

It evensmellscozy—I’ve got a steaming cup of jasmine tea on my desk, its fragrance mingling with the candle I lit (orange, cedarwood, and more jasmine).

The silence is almost overwhelming.

No garbage trucks banging around outside this building. No noisy neighbors threatening my sanity with their subwoofer that—on a semiregular basis—makes actual ripples in my water. No Lauren barging in uninvited to talk my ear off for an hour.

I fill it, instead, with Sebastian.

His voice memos are an absolute mess.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone flit from one subject to the next quite like Sebastian does. Chloe is like this sometimes, but her detours are usually more like little fireworks, distracted bursts of energy she just has to get out before returning to whatever she was talking about before.

Sebastian’s detours, though, are something else. It’s as if the entire history of his life is detached from any sort of linear timeline in his mind and, instead, is more like an intricate spiderweb.

Fascinating—but not exactly straightforward.

I’ve wondered about so many things over the years: Was his infamous rivalry with Jett Beckett actually real or convincingly staged for media attention? If it was real, was it pure and simple envy, two gorgeous guys with inflated egos who were forced to share a spotlight, or was there more to it than that?

Will he spill any secrets about the night Jett Beckett disappeared?

Will he spill any secrets about why the band disintegrated a few months later?

Will he spill any secrets that aren’t on anyone’s radar at all?

As many articles as I’ve written in a professional context, I’ve never truly had the freedom to ask the questionsIwanted answers to. Theorizing and speculating are common on the gossip blogger side of things—but at the various news outlets I’ve worked for, I’ve only ever found myself in a position to objectively report the truth.

Now is my chance to dig deeper.

The titles on Sebastian’s voice memos are super vague and incomplete, judging from the few I’ve already listened to. I’m praying the rest won’t involve anything more about school talent shows, or how he took his first piano lesson at age four, or how his mother drove him all over the place throughout his childhood to try to get him in front of the right people.

All of that is fascinating in its own right, but I already have enough about his early years to fill more than an entire chapter. That’s probably already too much—people want thejuicystuff.

And so do I.

I hit play, and Sebastian’s voice echoes off the walls and the polished concrete floor. As soon as he starts speaking, I know this particular voice memo will deliver.

File:sebgreen_empty promises.mp3

Date Recorded:February 7, 2025

SG:

The first time I met my manager, Jason, I had thisfeeling—it’s hard to even describe. I had no idea who he was, no idea how much power he had. How much power he wouldgainonce the band was a thing.

I remember seeing him for the first time out at the record label’s office in LA. Even just the way he thrust a bottled water at me whether I wanted one or not made me feel like my life would never be the same—and that he would be the one to change it.

He acted like he owned the place. Anything he said, he made you feel like the world was at his fingertips. No worries, no doubts, just absolute certainty that he could speak an idea and it would become reality. Jason had the sort of instincts and energy that could make anyone a star, and he had his sights set on me.

It would have been nice to know they weren’t set ononlyme.

We had meeting after meeting with all sorts of powerful people at the label, hours of back-and-forth about which demo would be the perfect one for me to record as a breakout track, more meetings and studio sessions with producers to turn a few of those tracks into reality. They loved my work, they said. I was going to behuge.

After all that, though—all those meetings and recording sessions—Jason took me out to this fancy lunch just so he could drop a bomb on me: the label was giving the song to someone else. They thought my solo career had potential, but they had other ideas, other plans—they wanted me to be the front man of a group they were putting together. A boy band.

It was only supposed to be for a little while, andthenwe’d circle back to my solo career.

What they didn’t tell me was that all of this—all the meetings and schmoozing and flattery and promises—all of it, even the exact same fancy restaurant where Jason broke the news—

All of it happened to Jett, too.

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